Hi everyone!
I'm back to share more about our latest efforts to craft the immersive world of SD2. To kick this blog off, I want to talk about how we've been developing the art style for the new game.
Art Style
We've spent a lot of time thinking about the core themes of Stranded Deep. One of our goals for SD2 is to strengthen the themes from the first game and create a strong visual identity moving forward. A huge part of the visual identity will be defined by our art style. We've built a killer art team to create this, led by our Art Director Csaba and Senior Artists Gabor, Petr, and Zsolt. They bring a ton of industry experience and passion to the project, which we're already seeing manifest in the high quality and amount of work they're pumping out.
When they joined the team and we first started to think about what SD2 could look like, I encouraged them to explore different art styles but try to lean towards realism (which feels right for Stranded Deep). A style I've always liked and wanted to explore more was combining simpler art styles with realistic lighting and post-FX. It creates a unique effect where your mind almost fills in the details, and even when you stop to look harder and break it down you find it's still consistent and pleasing. So the art team took that direction and spent some time experimenting and mocking up different variations and extremes so we could find the right balance.
We're aiming to hit somewhere around:
We've dubbed this "Stylized Realism" which ultimately combines simpler geometry (but not too simple) and stylized materials with realistic lighting and post effects.
Next, we wanted to start exploring how to apply this style to the main character, but before we could do that we spent some time understanding who they are.
The Protagonist
In SD1 the main character was a businessman thrown into the crazy situation of being stranded on an island. We took heavy inspiration from popular media like the Castaway movie and Lost TV series. Here is one of our original mood boards from SD1:
To take this theme into SD2 we've refined it down into you being an "ordinary person in an extraordinary situation." This will be a running theme for Stranded Deep moving forward.
We didn't have a nickname for the character in SD1 (–the pilot was called 'Collins') but we're affectionately nicknaming SD2's protagonist "Dave from accounting"
(We're workshopping nicknames for the female character, so let us know your suggestions!)
Now that we know who our character should be we could start to explore their visual design.
Character Design
While we work on the outfit design, our character artist Gabor has already started experimenting with how to apply "stylized realism" to the new character model. He started by creating a model with realistic features and proportions:
Next, he started to add more stylized 'pinched' features, but we decided that the definition in this version was too harsh and ended up giving 'Marvel super-hero' vibes:
So for the next version he split the difference:
This version combines the pinched features with softer edges and is close to hitting the level of detail we'd like. There's still a little more work to refine the style, maybe dialing the edges down a little more so it ends up somewhere in between versions #2 and #3, and we're experimenting with how much detail we place in the models or textures.
Here's how the female character is looking:
Overall, I'm looking forward to seeing how these keep developing and get refined into the final versions. I'm excited to see how they look when we apply our stylized realistic textures, add some sub-surface scattering and other lighting effects, and really dial in the look we're after.
Our style will flow onto all areas of the game including animals and props which are starting to take shape, with Gabor and Petr churning out blockouts and greyboxes. At the moment these models are simple blockouts that we can place into the world to understand their size and volume. Once we're happy with how they feel in the world, we'll make any adjustments and move on to creating the production models.
This little guy looks thrilled to be here:
Gabor is also hard at work on our new 'hero' animal and I can't wait to share that big fella with you.
Textures
Our greyboxes and environment will eventually need textures, and this is where our texture artist Zsolt comes to the rescue. Zsolt has created a load of new textures for the environment and is importing these into the game engine to see how they look with our current lighting setup. Second to the water, sand is the next most obvious feature in Stranded Deep so it's nice to see these textures already looking great.
All-in-all, I'm really happy with the hard work of the art team and seeing the awesome assets they're creating so far. Hopefully you can already see the love that is going into this game. This is just the tip of the iceberg (not a hint – no seriously).
Next time, I want to share more details about the new building system I mentioned in the last blog, in which I will dive deeper into how it's improving and evolving from SD1.
Until then–Stay Alive!